


On the Edge

by CPericardium



Series: The LBD-verse [4]
Category: Parahumans Series - Wildbow
Genre: Alternate Universe, College, Gen, Oneshot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-14
Updated: 2018-04-14
Packaged: 2019-04-21 22:38:52
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,364
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14294982
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CPericardium/pseuds/CPericardium
Summary: Contessa and Rebecca hang out.***A oneshot set in my powerless college AU Life Bends Down.





	On the Edge

**Author's Note:**

> Occurs later in the timeline, and is standalone because the events that take place are not particularly relevant to anything ever. Mucho thanks to betas Maroon Sweater and Skyrunner.
> 
> Due to finals, I won't be free to work on LBD Chapter 5 for the next 2-3 weeks or so. :(

Rebecca didn’t fully turn, but Contessa knew she’d heard the sound of the window opening from the instinctive tilt of her head towards the source.

If she wasn’t acknowledging other people’s presence, that was a bad sign.

“Good afternoon, Rebecca,” Contessa said, drawing out the syllables so as not to startle. Holding the top of the window frame for balance, she stepped out onto the neighbouring ledge.

Rebecca turned, then, and her smile steadied Contessa more than her grip on the frame did. “Contessa? What are you doing here?”

 _I could ask you the same._ “Taking in the sights,” she said. She nodded at the sky. “As you do.”

“As you do,” Rebecca agreed.

Rebecca scooted to the right to make space on her ledge. Contessa joined her, and they sat in a brittle silence six floors above ground.

Below them, people walked well-worn paths from class to class. They were insects from this height, specks crossing the courtyard only to disappear under the sheltered passageway leading into the chem building opposite. If Contessa hadn’t happened to be standing by a lab window mere moments ago, she might not have spotted her roommate perched up here in the humanities building. She might not have made it in time.

Contessa ignored the view. Instead she observed Rebecca out of the corner of her eye, taking stock.

Rebecca braced her palms on the sill in a manner that suggested she wanted to be swinging her legs, yet she was motionless. Her bearing was stiff, like she was doing her level best just to stay upright. Suspicious. Rebecca was a self-proclaimed advocate for contrapposto and endeavoured to exhibit this as much as possible, no matter how often people lectured her about spinal care.

“You mentioned you had a test today,” Contessa said. “How did that go?”

“It went pretty well!” Rebecca replied without pause. “I wrote six pages for the first question. Only managed three for the second.” She smiled wryly. “Time management is the bane of my existence.”

So was brevity, but Contessa left that unvoiced. “What did you write about?”

With mounting excitement, Rebecca went on at length about the historical impact of lower tax rates and the problems inherent in governmental intervention—how she’d wanted to discuss a particular stance concerning regulation but neglected to include it in her thesis, but that she was pleased she’d managed to convincingly challenge an argument put forth by an economist many times more famous than even her professor.

The wind stirred Rebecca’s long black hair, and for a while, that claimed Contessa’s focus. Some days Rebecca tied her hair up, in ponytails or topknots with a gel pen through the bun. Other days she wore it as one might a shawl, wrapping it around her neck. Now it curtained around her shoulders, poured into her hood. Contessa wished she had enough data to understand what these styles meant, if they meant anything. Hair down and loose _seemed_ normal to her, but she hadn’t spent a statistically significant amount of time around Rebecca to know for sure. What if the rest of the time, when no one was looking, Rebecca kept it braided? Or in pigtails? Or both?

The Schrödinger’s hair problem being what it was, Contessa dismissed style as an unreliable indicator of psychological well-being. Rebecca’s was certainly shiny and straight enough that she’d had to have conditioned recently. It also smelt faintly of peaches.

Rebecca nudged Contessa and pointed. “Look.”

Contessa looked. It was a bird.

Rebecca spread her arms wide to mimic wings. Then, losing her nerve, she brought them back to the safety of the ledge. “Makes a girl wish she could fly.”

“Do you think about that a lot?”

“Of course!” she exclaimed. “Who doesn’t?”

Contessa’s eyes followed the bird as it wheeled off into the cloudless blue sky. Her stomach churned restlessly with a sick feeling that had grown from the thumping in her chest. It felt like fear, but she’d never been afraid of heights.

“You wouldn’t have to go through customs, or LA traffic…” Rebecca said. “You’d be totally free to cross international borders whenever you wanted.”

Contessa had to admit that being able to bypass baggage checks would be convenient.

“I’d sit on Ayers Rock all day and drink lemonade,” Rebecca mused.

“Where would you get lemonade?”

“There are a bunch of natural springs in the area, aren’t there? I’d bring powdered mix. Okay, maybe not. Freshly squeezed is better.” She eyed Contessa. “You can come too, but you’ll have to take a helicopter because you can’t fly.”

“Mm. I don’t think there are landing pads on Ayers Rock. Bring a rope for me.”

“I’ll bring a _ladder_ ,” she said defiantly. “A really tall one. You can’t get that through customs.”

“You can, if it’s foldable.”

“This one won’t be. Because I can just carry the whole thing when I’m flying.”

“Your arms will get tired.”

Rebecca frowned. “They won’t, because I also have super strength.”

“They’ll get super tired.”

“They will _not_. That is the opposite of strength. Anyway, I don’t see why a foldable ladder should be less exhausting to carry than—oh, drag.” She rubbed the back of her neck, then looked at Contessa hopefully. “Can you just bring it on your helicopter?”

Contessa shook her head in mock reproval. “First day of flying and your arms are already tired. I’m not sure why I would want to go through the rigmarole of procuring a helicopter just to traipse around on Ayers Rock with someone who can’t transport a simple ladder.”

Rebecca sputtered and slapped at the sill with her palms.

“Although,” Contessa said, thoughtful, “I don’t mind providing the lemonade.”

They stayed there till the dusk bloomed dark around them. The courtyard gradually emptied. Rebecca rambled on.

Contessa listened, examining each word for hidden nuances as though it were an inkblot. As time passed, she stopped paying attention to their meaning and focused exclusively on the sound of sentences spilling into the space between them. All the while she could feel the solidity of the other girl’s presence beside her.

Just sitting there, back against glass while her feet dangled, made her feel strange in a way that _walking_ on ledges typically didn’t—she felt drawn towards the wind or Rebecca’s shoulder, like iron filings to a magnet. It was peculiar when she tended to swerve away from pressure rather than lean into it. A subconscious impulse, perhaps, from being so close to someone so warm.

She dedicated a few more minutes to navigating Rebecca’s cluttered headspace through a breadcrumb trail of subtly probing questions, then threaded her way back out when she found nothing outside the ordinary. “Rebecca,” she said, quietly, once the sick feeling had finally, _finally_  subsided.

“Yeah?”

“Were you going to—?” She trailed off and gestured at the ground, trusting Rebecca to pick up the implication.

Rebecca looked down, then at Contessa. Confusion coloured her voice. “Huh? Why?”

Contessa only shrugged.

Rebecca pursed her lips. “I was just going to stand up for a while,” she said, “but I got distracted. _L’appel du vide,_ you know? _”_

 _Call of the void_ , Contessa thought, and the sick feeling returned in waves.  

“Don’t worry,” said Rebecca, noticing her discomfort. “I made a harness just in case.”

She showed Contessa a tumbleweed of black nylon straps stapled together like something out of a bargain basement bondage catalogue. Knowing Rebecca’s proclivities, it was entirely possible that that was where she had gotten it.

“I even fastened a brace so the fall wouldn’t break my neck,” Rebecca added proudly.

Contessa tugged the makeshift harness out of her grasp. She pretended to inspect it. Her fingers flitted down the length of its elastic cord for points of weakness. Then, in one fluid motion, she snapped it in two and dropped it over the edge.

Rebecca watched the straps spiral and flutter in the draft below. She blinked. “I needed that.”

“You won’t,” Contessa said. “You didn’t anchor it to anything.”

“Oh. I mean, I was going to but...”

The sick feeling chilled, hardened, set. It was a struggle not to let it slip into her voice, but she couldn’t sound angry now. Not yet, not while they were still this high up. Still, the strain showed. “Why are you here, Rebecca? What were you going to do?”

Rebecca shifted, fingers curling and uncurling around the sill.

Contessa’s hand was poised to grab the girl’s wrist, should she not respond with words. “Rebecca _._ ”

“It’s my zipper,” she said.

The distress in Rebecca’s eyes was so genuine that it stilled the shadow of some anticipatory almost-grief that had been gathering in Contessa’s chest. “Your…?”

“My zipper. It’s been stuck to me since this morning. I can’t get it off.”

Contessa closed her hand, but her mouth remained open.

✶✶✶

When they were back on solid ground, alone together in their dorm, Rebecca hiked her shirt to expose a sliver of her smooth brown skin.  Her jean-shorts were laced corset-style on the fronts and rode high above her navel. _A lot of chafing in the name of fashion_ , thought Contessa, as she closed the distance. She searched Rebecca’s crotchular region, not with any lascivious intent, but to find said zipper.

After a moment, Rebecca guided her to her side where, curiously, the fly was.

Contessa prodded the Y-shaped tag above the interlocking hooks. The slider shifted, and the skin caught underneath stretched with it. Rebecca yelped and batted her fingers away.

“How,” said Contessa, pulling back, “does this have _anything_ to do with you almost bungee jumping off a building?”  

Rebecca winced, gingerly adjusting her posture. “Moving the zipper up or down just makes it worse,” she explained. “The only way is to tear it out, but I can’t take that plunge. Mental block or something. I was trying to simulate a sufficiently life-threatening situation that would cause me to become capable of superhuman feats.”

Contessa stared at her.

“Like Aron Ralston,” she said. “Or _Saw_.”

“Why didn’t you just glue your waistband to a boulder and wait for the dehydration to motivate you?”

“I thought of that,” she said, her voice suddenly subdued, “just like I thought of numerous scenarios where I’d be under immense duress to prove my moral character through self-inflicted agony. I even found a bladed pendulum and some microcassettes online. But unless I well and truly isolated myself, I’d know there was a chance of rescue. There wouldn’t be enough verisimilitude to induce a powerful fear response.” She gazed down at her side. “It’s no control or absolute control, Contessa. If this didn’t pan out, I was going to tie the zipper to the handle of that big industrial door in the cafeteria and then slam it really hard. I figured since the method works for human teeth, it should work for other kinds of teeth.”

Contessa shook her head slowly. “It doesn’t work for teeth.”

“It doesn’t?” She sounded even smaller than before.

“No,” Contessa confirmed.

Rebecca cast about for inspiration, and her eyes assumed that fiery gleam they did when her mind was taking off at a dead sprint. “Maybe if I tied a string to a ceiling fan…”

In spite of herself, Contessa felt her own fear response kick in. “ _Rebecca_ ,” she said, enunciating very carefully in an effort to lend gravity to her words, “the answer is not to start attaching parts of yourself to rotary appliances, or capering about on precarious overhangs, or deliberately submerging yourself in crucibles of mortal terror. You should have gone to student health services.”

“You don’t understand,” Rebecca argued. She gestured at her fly with a vehemence she usually reserved for laundry machines. “This zipper is literally Shylock incarnated as plastic. Whatever the cost, I must prevent it from collecting its debt by myself.”

“By extracting the pound yourself?” said Contessa incredulously. “You realise that it wins either way.”

“On my terms, at least.” Rebecca set her jaw.

Contessa was about to explain in very scathing tones why this was not a sensible philosophy to espouse, when Rebecca’s desk caught her eye. On it was a spool of fishing line, a hot glue gun, and a bear trap lying in a pile of screws and springs. The bear trap was in the process of being dismantled and had a kitchen egg timer connected to it.

Contessa looked back at Rebecca’s face, saw the determined thrust of her stance even as she clamped a hand to her hip to keep her pants from moving. She sighed.

“All right,” Contessa said. “I’ll be your Portia just this once.”

She knelt by her bed to retrieve a larger-than-standard first-aid kit from the drawer set in the frame and began picking through its contents.

“Has that been there this whole time?” Rebecca asked, eyes wide.

Contessa was surprised. She hadn’t expected her roommate to find much, because of all the false bottoms she’d installed, but even a desultory sweep of the room should have revealed several similar emergency kits. She considered telling her their locations, seeing as Rebecca lived in a perpetual state of emergency.

“Do you have snakebite tourniquets? Can I borrow them?”

“If one day you get attacked by a viper instead of a zipper.” Contessa set the supplies she needed onto her desk. “But yes. Replenish what you use. Note that this does not give you carte blanche to waste all my gauze the next time you run out of tampons.”

“I wouldn’t do that,” Rebecca muttered, and withdrew her hand from the bandage compartment.

“This is going to sting. Lie back and think of hamburgers,” Contessa instructed.

Rebecca obliged, climbing onto the bed and sprawling out on her back. She grinned, nervous, and her eyelids flickered as if uncertain whether or not to close. Her cheeks were slightly flushed.

Contessa brushed aside distracting thoughts as she reached for her fly.

“You’re not going to disinfect the wound with _that_ , are you? That’s so wild west.”

She raised her head. Rebecca was pointing at the bottle she’d placed next to the kit.

“No,” she replied, and leaned in with a pair of tweezers. “The bourbon is for me.”


End file.
